All Things Distributed

Every year the MIT Technology Review publishes a list of technologists and scientist under the age of 35 to honor their ground breaking inventions and research. In the past I have written a number of recommendations in support of these innovators and last year I was particularly happy to see George Candea recognized for his work on recovery oriented computing in general and for micro-reboots in particular.

This year the list is more impressive than ever. Two young academics made the slate: Ben Zhao for his work on structured overlay networks and Eddie Kohler for operating systems security. Surprisingly three internet entrepreneurs also make the list, all well deserved: Joshua Schachter for tagging and del.icio.us, Paul Rademacher for igniting the map mashup movement, and Jason Fried for relentlessly advocating simplicity in online development.

It was good to see some privacy and security innovators also make the list: Apostolos Argyris for chaotic synchronization, Roger Dingledine on anonymized email, Anand Raghunathan for mobile device security and Sumeet Singh who capitalized on the virus detection work he did at UCSD.

For the full list and details see the TR Website. The honoring ceremony will be at TR’s Emerging Technology conference and Jeff Bezos will be giving an exciting keynote. I will have to miss out this year because I am speaking at the Handelsblatt Future of IT Conference in Berlin.

Posted by Werner Vogels at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is nice that people thought yesterday’s posting was funny. There is however a very serious aspect to it. From the reactions I understand that people think that posting IM handles is too far-out to even consider seriously, which made it a good April’s Fools joke.  For me, I do not believe it is ridiculous for a company to engage in real-time interaction.

Amazon continuously innovates the way it interacts with its customers, trying to deliver a better customer experience. From the beginning that has meant engaging our customers to participate in ways that was not as common as it is now. Whether it is about discovering products that you may be interested in or about being as informed as possible about choices, about expressing your opinions or providing relationships, there is always a continuous stream of innovations happening at Amazon to improve the ways that customers can get value out of our services.  In many ways this is still day-one; Search-Inside-The-Book is not an endpoint, it is a beginning. For example we now use book content analysis to provide relationships (sips, stats, citations, etc.) between books that was not possible before. And the possibilities to do more are endless.

In my eyes, instant messenger, weblogs, forums, tagging, wikis, etc, are infrastructure. Infrastructure in the sense that it is interesting in what you do with it, in how you use it to provide value. How it can be a vehicle to affect change. Amazon Connect looks to some people like weblogs-for-authors; to others it does not meet all the weblog definition criteria. Whether it does or not is completely irrelevant, what is important is that we wanted authors to have new ways in which they could interact with their readers, and in that way this program delivers the extra value our customers (authors and readers alike) look for at Amazon.  The program is very successful and I am sure we will be improving it in ways to make it deliver even more value. I don’t think anybody cares whether new innovations around Amazon Connect will make it look more weblog-like, more IM like, or be something completely new.

For me, everything is game in making Amazon.com the best place for people to look for products, to provide their opinions about them, and to help other customers make good choices. If the best way to achieve that would include posting IM handles, or developing completely new real-time interaction techniques that match Amazon better, we would certainly do so. More importantly, we will continue to push the envelope in any area to deliver a better service.

PS. I didn’t write this to start yet another debate, I just wanted to clarify that there was more to it than just a joke …

Posted by Werner Vogels at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

In order to get closer to their customers, humanize Amazon, increase sales, and stay modern, Amazon.com has decided to make all Instant Messenger (IM) handles of its employees public. This way Amazon.com customers will get unprecedented access to the talented engineers at Amazon to answer all their questions, or just to have an interesting conversation about a new book or that old sci-fi movie. If you want to know why the shipping prediction date was not really clear, feel free to IM Justin Rudd, and get the details behind the algorithms he used to give Amazon.com customers a fast estimate on when they can expect their purchases.

As we have come to expect by now, Amazon.com is once again revolutionizing the industry with how customers are being served. It is expected other companies will be scrambling to imitate their success, and provide access to their employees also. Industry specialists and sociology professors alike have lauded Amazon.com for really “getting it”, for understanding that IM is the way that future generations will want to communicate.

When asked whether their employees would be given special training to handle the new forms of conversations, a company spokesperson responded that Amazon.com’s CTO, Werner Vogels, will be used as an example of a warm and fuzzy communication style. Rumors are that an early document written by Vogels titled “How to use blunt questions to get to the truth” was rejected as being too effective.

Update: This was indeed for some part an April Fool's joke, but there is also a very serious note to it. For that read part II

Thanks, Hugh, priceless

Posted by Werner Vogels at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (3)